Mark Twain - Autobiographical Writings

PENGUIN CLASSICS

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS

SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, a village about forty miles southwest of Hannibal, the Mississippi River town that he would later celebrate, writing as Mark Twain. In 1853 he left home to work as an itinerant printer and four years later became a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. With his piloting career cut short by the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, he went west and prospected and worked as a journalist in Nevada and California. In February 1863 he signed the pseudonym Mark Twain for the first time in an article for Virginia Citys Territorial Enterprise. His trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 became the basis of his first major book, The Innocents Abroad (1869), which made him famous. Roughing It (1872), his account of experiences in the Far West, was followed by a satirical novel, The Gilded Age (1873), Sketches: New and Old (1875), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). In 1891, he was compelled by mounting expenses to move his family abroad. In 189596, he undertook a round-the-world lecture tour to pay off creditors of his bankrupt publishing firm and then remained in Europe until 1900. His fortunes mended, he returned to America and found himself celebratednot only for heroically pulling himself out of debt but also for his uncompromising stands against injustice and imperialism. He died in his final home in Redding, Connecticut, on April 21, 1910.

R. KENT RASMUSSEN has written and edited eight other books on Mark Twain, including the forthcoming Dear Mark Twain: Letters from His Readers, as well as many books on other subjects. He is best known for his award-winning Mark Twain A to Z (recently revised as the two-volume Critical Companion to Mark Twain) and The Quotable Mark Twain. He holds a doctorate in history from UCLA and recently retired from his job as a reference book editor in Southern California.

MARK TWAIN

Autobiographical
Writings

Edited with an Introduction by
R. KENT RASMUSSEN

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First published in Penguin Books 2012

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Introduction and selection copyright R. Kent Rasmussen, 2012

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Twain, Mark, 1835-1910.

[Autobiography]

Autobiographical writings / Mark Twain ; edited with an introduction R. Kent Rasmussen.

p. cm.(Penguin classics)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN: 978-1-101-58943-4

1. Twain, Mark, 18351910. 2. Authors, American19th centuryBiography. I. Rasmussen, R. Kent. II. Title.

PS1331.A2 2012

818.40924dc23

2012003123

Printed in the United States of America
Set in Sabon

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ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the man best known to the world as Mark Twain, is one of the most autobiographical of American writers. His presence can be felt in almost everything he wrote. Overtly or through proxies, he placed himself in most of his essays and nonfiction books and built much of his fiction around his experiences. He was ever his own favorite subject and his thoughts often went back to his own past, so it should not be surprising that he eventually turned to composing autobiographyinitially by hand and later by dictation. During the last years of his life, his daily autobiographical dictations were becoming an obsession. According to his autobiography itself, he told his close friend William Dean Howells, if I should talk to the stenographer two hours a day for a hundred years, I should still never be able to set down a tenth part of the things which have interested me in my lifetime. Moreover, his autobiography would not be a mere book but an entire libraryand not a small one, either:

if I should live long enough, the set of volumes could not be contained merely in a city, it would require a State, and there would not be any multi-billionaire alive, perhaps, at any time during its existence who would be able to buy a full set, except on the instalment plan.

In all this, he was, of course, exaggerating. However, he was serious about composing a big autobiography. By the time he died in early 1910, the manuscripts constituting what he regarded as his formal autobiography had grown to nearly one-half million words. He led a long and complex life and had much to tell. Moreover, the history of his attempts to write his autobiography is a long and complex story in itself.

Mark Twains career as a professional writer commenced during the early 1860s, when he worked as a reporter for Nevada and California newspapers and contributed stories and sketches to literary magazines. By the time he left the Far West at the end of 1866, he had built a modest reputation as a skillful humorist but was still several years away from thinking of himself as an author. That transformation began with the publication in 1869 of The Innocents Abroad, his best-selling account of his travels in Europe and the Holy Land with the Quaker City steamship excursion two years earlier. The travel letters he wrote for newspapers during that trip and the book that grew out of those letters earned him a national reputation. Publication of Roughing It (1872), about his experiences in the Far West during the early 1860s, completed his transformation from journalist to author. His reputation then grew steadily, as he published The Gilded Age (1873), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884/1885), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court (1889), and other books, along with a steady stream of magazine sketches, short stories, and essays. Meanwhile, he further enhanced his reputation by undertaking a number of extended lecture tours. Even before he reached the age of forty, he had an international reputation and was regarded as an important American authoralbeit one who was best known as a humorist.